American Sniper Controversy

Let's Take A Look At The Real Reasons American Sniper Is Getting So Many People Worked Up

Perhaps the most baffling aspect to American Sniper is how Kyle never makes a mistake. While America has an issue with holding back on the trigger when facing innocent guys like Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown, every one of Kyle’s supposed 250 kills come off as righteous. The film’s depiction of Kyle, true to his own autobiography, is that of a sniper who didn’t hesitate at pulling the trigger, justified by simplistic reasoning between good and evil. “Savage, despicable evil” is how Kyle describes what he was fighting in his autobiography’s prologue. Kyle didn’t acknowledge the gray that Eastwood tries to. Such bifurcated terms would seem necessary in combat, since struggling with morals, in turn hesitating, would only help you lose.

The film never questions whether a single target could have been an innocent victim. Kyle doesn’t admit such a thing in his book, and the military certainly wouldn’t be eager to reveal such circumstances, so perhaps Eastwood and Hall would be out of line to suggest any doubt. They are sticking to the book, right? Well, no, actually.

The film makes some minor but significant alterations to one key scene, the prologue, where the sniper actually hesitated. An Iraqi woman walks out of a building with her child and towards a convoy of Marines, all while Kyle peers at her through his scope. According to Kyle’s autobiography, only the woman acts. He writes: “As the Americans organized, the woman took something from beneath her clothes, and yanked at it. She’d set a grenade. I didn’t realize it at first.” In the autobiography, Kyle admits to not seeing the grenade, easily concealed in the woman’s clothes. Instead his chief notices the “chinese grenade” moments later, yelling at Kyle to fire. He does.

However miniscule, there is a moment of doubt in that kill, which happened to be Kyle’s first. He only knew for sure that she had a grenade after pulling the trigger. After narrating that first kill, Kyle explains his reasoning for casting away doubt and a guilty conscience, insisting on the righteousness of his rifle. Nevertheless, that moment of doubt says a lot about the emotional complexity of war and the manner in which Kyle must convince himself to continue killing without hesitation.

In Eastwood’s film, the woman passes a big RKG anti-tank grenade over to her son, so that he can run it over to the American convoy, all in plain sight for Kyle. The scene bears Eastwood’s signature all over it, in that it’s preposterous and ill-considered. Why would an insurgent wait until she is out in the open to pass an RKG to her child? We know Kyle’s version of the events, where no such handoff happened and the grenade remained concealed, so why change the scene to something less plausible?

Besides amplifying the drama by making a child one of Kyle’s victims, and in turn the mother becomes monstrous, the scene casts away any doubt about his first kill and sets the tone for the rest. By exposing the RKG in that awkward handoff, the film allows Kyle and the audience to immediately see the threat, assuring everyone that Kyle’s work has conviction and stands above questioning, even if the war remains hazy.

In that moment, American Sniper subscribes to Kyle’s beyond-a-reasonable-doubt mentality that divides the world between good and evil, refusing to see the grey zone in between. Eastwood himself may not share that perspective on war, and perhaps meant for the film to be similarly murky. But he fumbled — which is nothing new.